WATCH: Fake restaurant becomes London's hotspot
It clearly doesn’t take a lot to become the city's highest-rated spot...
We all know that there is a constant change in what’s hot and what’s not. One moment you have the latest iPhone and six months later everyone is hyping up the newest innovation. Things can generate hype quickly.
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But is it worth the hype or do we just get swept up at that moment?
One journalist and filmmaker, Oobah Butler, decided to take it upon himself to do a little experiment.
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Butler, who is known for pulling weird and wonderful experimental media stunts, started by creating a fake TripAdvisor account. He had created this account for the restaurant, The Shed in Dulwich, which doesn’t exist.
Hoping to gain some familiarity in the local foodie scene, he then asked his friends to post positive reviews of The Shed on the platform.
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To make the restaurant even more “legit”, Butler used his own garden shed as the location and dealt with all enquiries on a burner phone he had purchased. He even bought a domain and built an entire website for the fake establishment.
After posting pictures of five-star worthy appetisers, which consisted of shaving foam, bleach tablets, and honey, the bookings from journalists hoping for a meal at the restaurant began flooding in.
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Butler decided to give his audience a one-night-only exclusive dining experience where he served them microwave lasagnas.
According to him, the inspiration for the experiment came from his days writing "fake" reviews for businesses that would pay him to write a positive review.
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"This convinced me that TripAdvisor was a false reality – that the meals never took place; that the reviews were all written by other people like me."
The Shed might no longer be a reality (although it never truly was), but it has served as a reminder that you shouldn’t believe everything you see on the internet.
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Main image courtesy of Vice/YouTube